Monday, May 04, 2009

Since I'm going to waste several additional hours getting the RantEngines properly
squared away (having discovered that CRON_TZ will not work in the
crontab for my server... gah), I've decided to dedicate the rest of this week to
housekeeping. I hope to make one or two non-negative enhancements to the actual content as well, but mainly it's just to make things tidier.

There are a couple of intended results, and a need to furnish
a
warning about unintended
results.

The intended results:

a little graphic in the right sidebar, promoting the
boycott of 'Israel' - if you click
through you will also be able to find a list of companies who do
business with, or are supporters of, the tribalist psychos who are
unwelcome in any civilised society;

a Google Search tool - meaning that you can make this blog
your
homepage and search from there (each search you do will
then add a weensy bit to blog revenue);

a change to the feedhost for the RSS/Atom feed (I want to
get the feed right, since there are more viewers
through the feed than through the Blogger page); and

a change to the ads within the RSS/Atom feed (furnishing
more ways for
you to show the love without having to dip into your wallet).

I'm also toying with the idea of giving Forbes the flick -
there's no
content they have that I think is worth pinching, and I'm not at all
sure that I am keen to be listed among 'their' bloggers. I've also got
to work out why stuff that I've posted on Twitter doesn't seem to
propagate through the Twitter applet onto the blog.

Among the unintended consequences (for feed recipients) of all
this ginning around, might be feed reflux - when the same items are
re-fetched by your feed reader simply because some part of the content
has changed (e.g., a change to the blog layout causing the entire feed
to be viewed as 'new content'). That's a bit of a pain, but there is no
way around it.

Conversely, there might also be an interruption to feeds, due
to the change of feedhost (from FeedBurner to Google... but the
underlying architecture is still FeedBurner, I think). I am not sure
whether the little 'chicklet' for the feeds, needs to be re-done (I
think not).

And of course no week-of-housekeeping would be complete
without me buggerising around with the layout of the blog. This always
involves periods during which I completely stuff up the template, and I
expect this time to be no different. Still, the layout has to be fixed: I
have always eschewed the idea of 'custom' CSS based on screen
resolution within Blogger, because the only methods that work
consistently require Javascript. When the blog migrates to my own
hosting (which will happen a bit later) I can use PHP to get browser
and OS attributes, and build the appropriate CSS file
on-the-fly (there will be some 'core' parts of any CSS file which will
be invariant with respect to screen resolution).

The 'buggerising around with the layout' is to try to overcome a
problem that I have discovered since switching to a wide screen (my new
screen is only a 22" jobbie, but it made clear that problem).

Optimum column width - for reading with ease - is 30-35 ems
(an 'em' is the width of the lower-case 'm', regardless of the font
size). That will yield about 10 words per line; this makes
concentration easier. If there are more than 20 words per line, the eyes have to
do too much moving - and if a column is too wide then reading is like watching a tennis match.

I have also decided to do the 'vanilla' thing and switch the default paragraph font to Arial (it used to be Arial Narrow, which is
my personal preference).